


little trouble, what're you doing tonight?

by wolfchester



Category: Outer Banks (TV)
Genre: 5 + 1, And loved it, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, a bit of, except this is 6 + 1..., i tried to be funny and then it got sad, thrown in there, times kie has played nurse to obx's resident dumbass jj maybank
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 14:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23979451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfchester/pseuds/wolfchester
Summary: jj will keep getting beat up (skinning his knees, breaking his wrist, smashing his fist into a kook's face) and kie will always come to the rescue.
Relationships: JJ & Everyone, JJ/Kiara (Outer Banks), also kie & friendship, jj & FRIENDSHIP
Comments: 28
Kudos: 207
Collections: Jiara Ocean Kiss Soulmate Endgame Excellence (aka a jiara-centric fic collection)





	little trouble, what're you doing tonight?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a few lovely prompts on tumblr about jiara hurt/comfort and this is what resulted ............ sigh why do i write so much dialogue and so little plot SORRY
> 
> (where does this place in the canon timeline? who fuckin knows. stop asking questions n just try to enjoy ok)
> 
> title from: little trouble by better oblivion community centre

* * *

_ hey, little trouble, what’re you doing tonight? _

_ I got a bad thought, you can make it right _

_ fell on the concrete with all my might _

_ got up, dusted myself off, now I’m ready for the fight _

_ found a place to blind your darkness with bright strobe lights _

_ no cops, no fire marshalls, can dance all night _

_ with your sad-eyed doppelganger you look just like _

_ your heartbreak’s not your own anymore _

_ I’ll tell you that I love you, I’ll scream it twice _

_ you ask over the music, “did I hear that right?” _

_ yes, I swear I told you in some past life _

_ right before they counted us off _

_ it’s the luck of the draw _

* * *

Kiara is first called upon as JJ Maybank’s chief nurse one cold March evening.

Pope, desperate for a few hours away from his well-meaning but overbearing parents, begs the other three to take the boat out on the marsh, even though it’s barely fifty degrees out. Always up for an adventure — and drawn in by Pope’s promise to bring some “borrowed” alcohol with him — they all head down to the docks at seven in the evening to board the Pogue.

“I don’t know why I agreed to this,” Kie grumbles, pulling a thick woolen blanket tighter around her puffer-jacket clad body as John B eases the boat out from the dock. “If I get hypothermia, my dad’s gonna kill me. He’s already mad at me for coming out with you guys tonight.”

“Your dad needs to  _ chill _ ,” JJ comments with a smirk. He tugs on a beanie that barely covers his ears and zips up his patched waterproof jacket, a hand-me-down from John B. “You’ll be fine. Pope brought us coffee.” He gestures to said boy, who’s cradling a giant Hydroflask filled with hot liquid. 

“Hey! No! This is for everyone!” Pope exclaims as JJ tries to take a swipe at the flask. JJ sticks his tongue out at his friend but steps away, making his way to the end of the boat where the cooler of bait sits.

Kiara watches him rummage through the cooler and pick out a few chunks of bait. “Are you really going fishing?”

He turns around to face her, all smiles even though there’s a rough onshore wind whipping at his face. “Of course, Kie. Everyone knows night fishing is the best. What— did you think we were only here to drink some of Pope’s dad’s shitty beer?”

“Well, that’s what I was hoping we’d be doing,” Kie mumbles at the same time as Pope speaks.

“Okay, first of all, my dad’s beer isn’t that shitty. It’s not my fault he likes craft beer. You should be grateful for any free alcohol you get. And second, I didn’t even bring beer. I bought  _ this. _ ” Pope pulls a silver flask out from his coat jacket and flashes it to JJ and the others.

JJ’s eyes go wide. “Pope Heyward, my  _ boy _ ! You’re turning into a rebel, my dude.” He stretches across the boat to snatch the flask out of his hand, and Pope doesn’t try to stop him. JJ opens it and takes a sniff, then a quick swig. “Ooh, bourbon. Very nice.”

“Whiskey, Pope? Really?” Kie asks incredulously, even though she herself is eyeing up the contents of that flask. 

Pope shrugs. “Mom and dad and the whole scholarship thing is stressing me out too much. I feel like I’m going insane. I need to unwind.” Somehow, Pope implying he needs to  _ unwind with a shot of whiskey _ is so hilariously uncharacteristic that Kie begins to laugh. JJ joins in, too, from his spot sticking bait onto fishing hooks.

“Man, if I knew this was gonna be that kind of night I would have brought some  _ herbal supplements _ , if you catch my drift,” he quips. Kie rolls her eyes good naturedly although she can’t help but crack a smile.

“What’s JJ done this time?” John B calls back from the front of the boat.

“Nothing,” Pope answers, carefully walking to the front of the boat and settling himself into the passengers chair. “I bought whiskey,” he says, showing the flask to John B like it’s some kind of prized possession. 

The wind picks up enough that Kie can’t hear any of the following conversation from up the front. She turns her attention to JJ.

“You need any help?” she asks him. 

He glances over at her with a grin, beanie pulled down almost over his eyebrows and nose turning red with the cold. His fingers are deftly placing bait onto the hooks of one long fishing line. “No, I’m fine. I’m really good at thi—  _ fuck! _ ” A hook slices right through his thumb, lodging itself in his skin.

Even in the near darkness, Kie can see it’s starting to bleed. Pretty badly, too. Red specks are dripping down his hand and splashing onto the decking. “What did you do?” she chastises like she would to a little kid, but rushes over to inspect his finger just the same.

He’s moaning and groaning like he’s got a knife in his finger, not just a fish hook. “What’s going on back there?” John B calls while Pope turns to shake his head at his best friend. 

“JJ got a fish hook stuck in his finger,” Kie says, deadpan, like this happens all the time. She reaches out to still JJ’s hand. “Stop flapping your hand all over the place. It won’t help.” She’s calm and collected compared to JJ, who keeps shouting obscenities and hesitantly trying to remove the hook but chickening out every time he gets close to doing so. 

“My finger is fucking frozen,” he complains, the slightest twinge of panic in his voice. “I can’t get it out!”

“Just— stay still,” she says, wrestling his hand under her arm so she can get a better look at it. “Pope, light, please?” The boy clicks on his flashlight and aims it towards JJ and Kie while John B slows the boat. With the extra light, she’s able to see that the barbed end of the hook has dug itself deep into the pad of his finger. This is going to require more than the normal gentle pull. “I almost got it. I just need some fishing line...”

“Fishing line?” JJ asks, that hint of trepidation in his tone growing and growing. “What the hell do you need fishing line for?”

“To get you out of this mess,” Kie answers as she carefully cuts a length of nylon line and loops it through the curved handle of the fish hook, tying it off at the end. “This might hurt.” 

She gives the hook a light warning tug and JJ curses, twitching to move his thumb away. Her steady grip on his arm prevents him from doing so. Little thin threads of JJ’s blood trickle down his palm and gather at where her fingers meet his wrist. 

JJ hisses in pain as she presses down on his thumb. “You’re such a baby, J,” John B teases, calling out over his shoulder. 

While JJ’s distracted with coming up with a retort to John B’s comment, Kie takes the opportunity to remove the barb from his finger with one quick jerk. “Fuck! Kie!” His blue eyes are comically wide, his eyebrows furrowed in shock. She laughs at him, because he’s her best friend and he looks fucking ridiculous and she can.

“God, you’re an idiot,” she chuckles, lifting his hand to his eyeline to show him his now hook-less thumb. “Look, it’s out. You’re fine.” The wound is still dripping blood, so she drops his hand to go and rifle through one of the storage boxes for the first aid kit she could have sworn they had. “Hey, John B, where’s the first aid?”

“I don’t know,” the boy shrugs. “I don’t know if we ever had one.”

Kie sighs. “We definitely do, I just—” She looks over at JJ, who is still gripping his wrist and squinting down in pain at his bleeding thumb. She notices his nose and mouth scrunch up into a grimace and asks in disbelief, “Wait, JJ— are you  _ crying?" _

He doesn’t answer the question directly, just keeps staring down blankly at his hand, face paling by the second. “Is it supposed to bleed this much?”

Kie wouldn’t say it out loud, but no, she’s pretty sure it’s not meant to bleed that much. In lieu of a band-aid, Kie unwraps her headband and goes to tie it clumsily around JJ’s bleeding hand. He looks across at her and tilts his head as if to ask a question that would probably be along the lines of  _ wait, isn’t this your favourite? _ , and she’s not really in the mood to deal with thoughts like: 1. the fact that JJ knows which headband is her favourite (okay, she wears it, like, every day, but still!) and 2. that he might be worried he’ll ruin the organic orange-and-yellow cotton with his stupid fishhook blood forever. And this is why she answers him before he can speak. “It’s fine,” she says. “Just wash this and give it back to me, okay?”

The smile he gives her is almost too much for seven-thirty on a Saturday in March, and it warms her to her toes. She’d reach up to playfully ruffle his hair if he wasn’t wearing a beanie, but since she can’t, she leaves her hands clenched at her sides and takes a step back to sit down on the edge of the boat. The grin wears off and soon JJ is looking back down at his finger, inspecting the small patch of blood softly soaking through the fabric. He flexes his hand. 

“I still can’t feel my thumb. It’s numb,” he says in monotone, brows drawn together. 

She hears a giggle from the front of the boat and it’s John B, kicking back his heels and settling into his seat, taking a swig out of Pope’s whiskey flask. “Haha...numb? Thumb?” He pokes Pope in his side. “It rhymes. Get it?"

Pope rolls his eyes and hides a chuckle. “Yeah, John B, I got it.”

“Well, good,” Kie says, focusing her attention back on JJ. “You won’t be able to feel any pain, then, huh?” She picks up Pope’s Hydroflask and waves it in front of her. “You want some coffee?”

Any mention of caffeine — whether it’s coffee or Red Bull — and JJ’s in. He stretches out to grab the flask from her hands and quickly (yet somewhat awkwardly, what with the giant bandage wrapped loosely around his hand) unscrews the lid, taking a gulp of the coffee, not even flinching at the temperature of it. It’s almost admirable.

“Put some of the bourbon in it so it numbs him up even more,” Pope comments, taking the flask from John B and passing it to Kie, who in turn passes it to JJ. JJ pours far too much as is necessary into the larger flask and takes another drink.

He sputters into a cough.“Oh, fuck, that’s disgusting,” he complains, wiping the back of his milk-stained mouth with the bandage. 

Half-dried blood smudges his cheek without him knowing, and Kie laughs at him at the same time as Pope exclaims, “You just poured like, the whole flask into that, man! Now there’s none for the rest of us!”

“Hey, calm down, Pope,” JJ replies, and the alcohol must already be doing the trick because that trademark JJ smirk is back on his face, minus the grimacing. “I’m the invalid here, alright? Cut me some slack!”

Pope whirls out of his chair to tackle the flask off of JJ but misses it entirely as JJ ducks out of the way, sending Pope sprawling across the floor of the boat. JJ laughs giddily, all pain forgotten, and tackles Pope right back, rubbing his fist across Pope’s hair, giving him a noogie. 

The two of them, watched closely and with amusement by John B and Kie, roll around on the deck like a pair of dumb wild animals. The sound of JJ’s laughter and Pope’s grumbling echoes out over the water despite the whistling of the wind, and Kie doesn’t even mind the fact that her favourite headband is being used as a band-aid, because JJ’s smiling and happy and making them all laugh, and isn’t that the best thing there is?

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr @jjmaybank and cry with me about this STUPID SHIP THAT WON'T LEAVE MY BRAIN ALOOOOONE


End file.
